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An episode from 12/7/22: Tonight, we enter into the early years of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), from his birth in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands, to his time in the Borinage mining region of Belgium. It was there, at the age of twenty-seven\u2014and after years of personal and professional failures\u2014that he hit bottom \u2026 and suddenly realized he was an artist.

In the first half of the episode, I read from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith\u2019s biography, \u2060Van Gogh: The Life\u2060. The second half is devoted to a handful of letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother in 1879 and 1880, where he admits the humiliation of his failures, and then revels in his newfound passion for drawing and painting. The letters can be \u2060found online here\u2060.

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Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.